Fifty years on the job! Thank goodness they didn't give me a gold watch. [View all]

I don 't wear a watch. I have sensitive skin, and any watchband, even if made of a chemically neutral substance such as gold, will have me scratching my wrist and looking for anti-itch medication within three hours.

But my immediate co-superiors, who are the two top guys in my outfit, did put on a little dinner. There were only about 16 of us. It was comprised of old friends from the beginning days and some newer ones, some of whom hadn't even been born when I started. But these were people who had earned (for better or for worse!) my friendship and respect over the years, and I was happy to have them there. Out of the about 16 people, we had natives of the USA, Canada, Brazil, Belgium, the Netherlands, England and one Ukrainian. My friend from the Netherlands even came all the way here (Oklahoma, as fate would have it) just for the occasion, a humbling gesture of friendship that I'd be at a loss to repay.

When I was recruited, I was 23, just a year out of my university, with a diploma that I soon realized was nice wall decoration, but not paying the rent on its own. My parents were after me to go to graduate school and learn how to really "make it" in the world. They offered to foot the bill (not as financially destructive in 1975 as it would have been now). But I just wanted out of academia for a while. I was offered a post based in New England, and I loved the area. Even my parents agreed that a year or two of practical experience out there in the "real world" wouldn't be the worst thing I could do. For my part, I was so bold as to ask--before I even started--for a lot of extra vacation time, because I had met this fabulous girlfriend in Germany. She had not completed her studies, and could not just move to North America on a whim. My top guy, a very forward-thinking individual, told me that if I could "make myself useful over there," I could take all the time I wanted. He knew that I already spoke German, French, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Catalan and Italian. So, I did my level best to make myself useful, and indeed got to spend enough time with my German girlfriend to keep the connection alive. We have now been together for over 51 years.

When I joined, the "company," for lack of a better term, consisted of about twelve "20-somethings," in some cases just barely! Add in a receptionist, accountant, and some other support staff, and we were close to 20 people, to me an immense responsibility for a guy my age to be running. I was glad I wasn't the one to be running it. Things went well for a while, but then came the Reagan recession.

Interest rates went up over 15%, and businesses were failing all over the USA. That kind of interest rate made the US Dollar the darling currency worldwide, and the value of the US dollar nearly doubled against most major currencies. Great if you were planning a European vacation, but fatal to US companies who sold things overseas, since the price to the overseas customers had just doubled. Being not the only ones in dire peril, my top guy talked frequently with our biggest rival, who was in Dallas. A desperate survival measure, a merger, was suggested, studied, and then implemented. Taxes, costs, and location all favored Texas over Boston, and so the new HQ became Dallas, and all of us "Boston" people moved to Texas. This was 1982, and we had barely turned thirty. For me, it was mostly a paper move, anyway, as I was already spending most of my time in Europe, finally (after 8 years!) marrying my German girlfriend.

The risk of the merger turned out to be the right one. What was left of the two outfits, after Reagan's high interest rates had practically devastated us, merged very well, and we began to grow again. There were some dips along the way, Cheney's 2008 disaster being bad, but nowhere nearly as bad as Reagan's 1980s struggle. We were in a strong enough position that the top people, myself included, were in a position to take a yearly salary of $1 for as long as it took to weather the storm so that our lower income employees, who stuck with us at remarkably high percentage rate, could be retained without reducing their salaries. We did work our asses off, and grew and grew. Now, the barely twenty somethings are seventy-somethings. Most of us are still here. Survival battles forge strong ties. My top guy and I were each other's best man at our weddings, and the twelve twenty-somethings are now a thousand people worldwide.

The concept of forging strong friendships did not die out with our generation, and some people there last night, including the woman who is now the boss of our major East Coast office, are barely over thirty, as is my colleague from Kyiv, who is not part of our outfit, but works closely with both me and our NL office near Utrecht, and is a valued friend. The several Americans there were from Seattle, Mississippi, New York, and points in between. Attained positions, accumulated wealth (or lack thereof!), time spent on the job, these were all minor differences of little significance last night. Though it was ostensibly to celebrate our (my) fifty years on the job, it was also a gathering of very diverse equals, people with great mutual respect and no one greater than any other, except for the age listed on our IDs. There were no speeches or trinkets--just conversations and memories. That's the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it.